Title: Nowhere
Author: MissAnnThropic
E-Mail: miss_annthropic@yahoo.com
Spoilers: Fractures
Summary: The battle's over and Aeryn's looking for Crichton in the rubble.
Disclaimer: None of it's mine. I'm just a sad little fangirl that spends her days writing fanfic and watching taped episodes of her favorite shows :(



He'd called it Armageddon. Before the fighting began he had named it that, even if he was the only one who would call it by such a strange name. It was another Earth word that didn't make sense to her, had no intrinsic meaning in and of itself, but in some way it did to John and in the end that's all that really mattered.

The conflict had been bloody... more lives than Aeryn could count had been lost. If Armageddon in the human's tongue meant that then it was as fitting a name as any. The irony was that this day, this place, had erupted so violently in the conflict that it would never need a name. Some battles were too costly to ever be forgotten and beyond the need for names.

The crew of Moya had found their final stand on the planet's surface. Aeryn had become separated from her shipmates in the attack... their plan had called for each to play their part in a different location. Crichton had had his own post with his arch nemesis Scorpius, overseeing the opening of the wormhole over the rotating planet that brought forth the mass of Peacekeeper forces to confront the Scarran armada that had rallied for an attack on the Known Territories. Crichton had once said he would never join sides with Scorpius... a lot had changed for all of them.

Crichton had been the last crewman of Moya Aeryn had seen before the fighting started. She didn't know who, if anyone, had survived.

Aeryn was covered in dirt, soot, and blood from boots to ponytail as she picked her way on foot through the carnage. Signs of life were few... they'd expected as much of an outcome. Untold numbers had died here.

Aeryn was already opening herself to accept that she might be the only one of her group left.

Her steps took her toward the remains of the Peacekeeper temporary outpost... where Crichton, if he were alive, would have been kept because he was too valuable to be treated with disregard. After today no one would question the potential use of the knowledge he possessed... the Peacekeepers and Scorpius especially would not risk that falling into Scarran hands.

Scorpius himself would have killed Crichton before the Scarrans could have taken him. John knew that betrayal was a possibility but had gone to Scorpius's aid anyway.

It would have made Aeryn sick if she had any feeling left to think that there had been no choice. Their options dwindled from few to none, and John had willingly walked into the lair of the man who had tortured and hunted him. It might have broken Crichton; Aeryn wasn't sure. She'd seen the human live through so much, but she'd seen him buckle and break, too... she'd seen him die. No one knew better than she that John Crichton had limits. No one knew better than she that he would let himself go beyond his limits when there was no other way.

The frelling human gave too much of himself to a universe that didn't appreciate what he gave up for them. Aeryn was bitter to think that she had been made to give up Crichton twice for lives she didn't even know. If Crichton was selfless then she'd become selfish enough for both of them.

Her anger was never enough, her grief only an added burden on a human scientist backed into a proverbial corner. She raged at the night and at herself as Crichton marched into Scorpius's waiting ship.

The battle had raged, possibly for days unbroken. The sky over the planet had filled with thick clouds of smoke, thunderstorms had crept over the lands, and together they had completely obscured the planet's sun. The passage of time became subjective. For the dying time stood still until it felt as though the entire planet had stopped moving in deference to the dead.

Aeryn looked around at the carnage, the vista of still bodies, and felt as though she was the last person left standing.

Rain had begun to fall from the sky like silent tears. No one would cry for those lost on this day... they were the kind of fighters that no one mourned. Peacekeepers on one side, Scarrans on the other, and a vagabond group of escaped prisoners caught in the fray. If the sky could cry then the better for it. Aeryn had run out of tears to cry, now there was only numb hope.

Part of her felt kinship with the dead. She wouldn't leave this place if he was dead. She'd survived him once... she wouldn't do it again. If he was dead she'd lie herself cold by his side in shared oblivion... that at least she could do for herself.

There was a strange calm in knowing her own fate. There was a deadened relief in knowing she wouldn't suffer through the loss again. One should have to lose someone like John Crichton only once in a lifetime.

She began to notice the bodies at her feet were increasingly those of Sebaceans. Her step slowed so she could search the remains of faces for that one most painfully familiar. If she came across Crichton she would know it. She knew every part of him; she could know him by a lock of hair, a hand, a portion of face, a rough form. More than that she believed she would just know when she saw him.

There were strings of faces that looked human but none of them were.

Aeryn licked her lips absently, noting that even the rain tasted like ash. They'd burned the sky.

Aeryn's eyes scanned the sea of corpses, hunting for the one figure that would decide her fate.

The Peacekeeper facility was slag and rubble, jutting fragments of upright walls the only remaining hints to its previous structure and shape.

Aeryn felt resolution sinking into her bones. The facility had been hit, where Scorpius had been greedily hording John Crichton. Horror and grief would have been asking too much of her when she had so little of herself to give. She wasn't crushed so much as resigned and maybe in some tucked away corner sad. She wished it could have been different somehow.

Aeryn took a few more steps in the direction of the facility just as the comm badge on her vest, broken in half, began to sputter and hiss. Someone was trying to contact her... someone from her group, maybe even Pilot on Moya.

Aeryn reached up and muted the sound function without responding. Scorpius had not allowed Crichton to keep his comms, and that was the only person Aeryn was interested in hearing from. Still, it was a small measure of peace to know someone else she cared about had survived... that someone from their original group might come out of this alive in the end. It was more than she'd expected a microt ago.

Aeryn scanned her surroundings again, wondering when she should realistically give up her search. She settled on somewhere between Peacekeeper apathy and human tenacity. She could afford Crichton that much without blinding her to what might be the ultimate truth. She wouldn't search forever because forever would be too much. If she were John she would not think twice of looking that long, but Aeryn wasn't and couldn't be Crichton. Being Crichton would tax her beyond repair.

Aeryn came to a stop as her eyes lighted upon a huddled figure tucked against the remains of one of the walls. The shape was so still, so inwardly drawn, that Aeryn at first mistook it for another corpse. Somehow the way the rain rolled off the figure's living skin, different than how the rain slid over cold flesh, told her she had found someone else alive.

She took two steps closer and that was close enough to know beyond a doubt the figure was Crichton.

Aeryn quietly reached him and knelt in front of his curled body. Crichton was covered in the same filth of war that she was. Like her, he'd seemed to have absorbed some of it into his being. Some of the blood staining his skin and clothes was his own. A gash had been opened on his right cheek, already thickening and clotting in a dark line. The cut would become a scar in time.

Aeryn would know him for his scars, as she had the John before, because were it not for them she could not know the Crichtons apart. So long and far it had taken her to understand that, that they were the same in different skins. She had to memorize the skins to recognize one man from the other. Even then, Aeryn found herself struggling to remember if a phrase or a look had been from the John on Talyn or the one before her now. She was losing the lines she'd drawn between them.

Aeryn decided it was probably just as well. Knowing the same man for two different people had only caused pain... too much pain to too many people.

Aeryn hunkered before Crichton, watching him in the ashy rain.

John turned his eyes, so vibrantly blue and so much older than before, up to Aeryn and studied her in silence. At that moment that she was alive seemed to be enough for him.

Aeryn settled her weight on to the ground in front of him, studying him in return. That he lived was enough for her, too.

Crichton's eyes, at long delay, moved away from Aeryn and stopped to rest on the rubble left of the Peacekeeper facility.

Aeryn knew John well enough to know what he wasn't saying. With that look she knew Scorpius was dead. Even if he was an enemy he was a link, a part of the life John had built away from his home planet. Today every loss bit deeply, even the ridding of an enemy. There was so little left... with so few remaining who John knew, who knew him, what and who he was became somehow ghostly. He might be only Aeryn away from being forgotten. For all he'd done if no one lived who knew him he would cease to exist as he knew himself. The name John Crichton would slip into the realm of just another unknown name.

In the fields of dead it was uncertain if being lost like that was a good thing or bad.

Aeryn, for her part, had everything she had dared to hope for following this battle. John Crichton was alive, he was beside her... anything he wanted beyond that she was willing to go along with. The way she saw it death had cheated itself to give her back the only creature she'd ever loved when he probably shouldn't have survived. If it was the only favor she could ever expect for the rest of her life she was content with that.

Crichton turned his eyes back to her, searching her gaze for what Aeryn wasn't entirely sure. She didn't need to understand anymore... if Crichton took her to him then she didn't care about the rest.

Aeryn leaned forward, dropping her forehead on to the knee John had drawn up into his chest. Time could abandon them now... she had what she needed.

John's hand came to rest atop her wet hair, fingers shaky but gentle.

Aeryn reached up to her vest and unpinned the comm badge. She pulled back her head fractionally so she could look down at it, running her thumb over the volume control and disengaging the mute feature.

As before, a voice that never became real or recognizable tried to reach them through the static and hiss of the damaged device.

Aeryn stared down at the comms, still not doing anything to answer her seeking shipmates, then looked up at Crichton.

He was watching the sputtering comms, too, the muscles in his face tight and brow furrowed. The rain was finally starting to make a dent in their state, dirt and blood slowly starting to leak in trails along with the rainwater down their faces, revealing at last the clean skin underneath thought lost forever.

Their eyes both converged a long time on the comm badge, silent, before Aeryn looked up and met Crichton's returned gaze. So long running, being hunted, sought out, followed... the same awaited them if they went home. They'd set the same cycle in motion all over again when they returned; it was always the same, a dance they'd come to understand intimately with time and repetition.

They were both dead to everyone right now. Their demise in the conflict would not be questioned... so many were killed that two more would seem like nothing, a drop in the sea.

Crichton reached out and closed his hand over Aeryn's as it held the comm badge between them. Maybe everyone was better off if they stayed dead. Moya would be safe, so would the dear companions they traveled with, strangers who'd become family somewhere along the way. More importantly, no one would be hunting John Crichton if he was dead. He could sleep, he could breathe, and Aeryn could share that deserved peace with him if he'd let her.

Crichton looked up into Aeryn's eyes, silently asking her if she was willing to give up the home she'd come to know.

The truth was the sacrifice would be harder on Crichton that it would ever be on Aeryn. As Crichton had once said to her, 'anywhere in the universe, you pick the planet'.

She was ready to stop at whatever cost it came.

Aeryn steadily reached down and placed the comm badge on the stained ground and left it there. She would never pick it up again.

Aeryn looked back at Crichton and she finally, at last, began to feel free. He was hers, she was his... they were all each other had and would have for some time to come. The totality of that possession, the exclusivity of it, completed her. They could start over, together. They could get it right, at last.

John carefully unfolded and stood up, taking Aeryn's hand and pulling her up after him.

They would find transport, a ship left after the battle that could carry them off the planet, and then they would disappear. Their friends, those who had lived through the days of fighting, would mourn their loss but they would accept it. Moya's crew was good at one thing above else, and that was adapting to loss. Some day they would have only memories of a reformed Peacekeeper that became more and the stubborn human that loved her.

It was a good way to be remembered by those best suited to remember them.


END